Check out Another Angry Voice on Substack

During the Another Angry Voice heyday I was getting huge amounts of traffic from Facebook and Twitter, but I've gradually been tuned down to such an extent that links I post to this blog are now virtually invisible to the 400,000 people who follow AAV across these platforms.

During the 2017 General Election Facebook virality made me the most shared political writer of the entire election campaign. Three of my articles achieved over a million hits each (the #1, #2, and #7 most shared articles of the entire campaign), and almost all the other articles easily passed 100,000.

These days AAV has been tuned down so much that it's a rarity when one of my increasingly rare blog posts beats 10,000 hits, which equates to a 90%+ collapse in visibility since 2017, despite my follower count continuing to rise slightly.

The Facebook algorithm has basically made AAV invisible to 97% of the people who follow the page, including many thousands who have explicitly asked for AAV to be prioritised in their feed via the "see first" option.

I've basically got no choice at this point but to try to diversify my social media presence, and creating a new AAV Substack seems like the logical pace to start.

Substack is like a blog host, social media account, fundraiser, and mailing list all rolled into one.

The main benefit is that there is no dodgy social media censorship algorithm between me and my Substack audience, deciding on their behalf that the majority of them no longer want to to see any of my content.

If you follow me on there, you'll get notifications every time I put up a new post, unless you decide to unsubscribe for yourself.

I'll aim to do around five posts per week to begin with to avoid overwhelming people with too much stuff.

I'll continue posting things on Facebook too, because I still have a huge audience there. But the new plan is to try to build Substack up as a kind of "inner circle" for my most supportive and enthusiastic readers.

I fully expect the majority of Substack subscribers to choose the free option, but if you can afford to sign up for a paid subscription you will be helping me out enormously, and supporting me to keep producing more content.

Here's the link:

Another Angry Voice on Substack

Thanks everyone,

Tom (Another Angry Voice)
 

Is AI really a threat to the survival of humanity?

AI experts have once again warned that AI represents a potential threat to the survival of humanity, putting it on a par with pandemics and nuclear war.

The smug conspiratorial response from people who aren't AI experts is that the AI experts are deliberately overstating the existential threat to human survival to drum up interest in AI, which they're doing for their own personal profit.

"The tool I've helped create could wipe out humanity" seems like a very odd way of advertising your services if it's actually just a harmless piece of tat that simply creates new memes and writes fake essays isn't it?

However the dangerous applications and consequences of AI are already becoming clear to those who have been paying attention.

One of the most concerning things is the way AI simply invents citations (research papers, news reports, criminal cases ...) to support the assertions it's asked to make.

One teacher set their students the task of getting AI chatbots to write an essay for them, and then finding the errors for themselves. 100% of the 63 AI generated essays contained hallucinated information, fake quotes, citations to invented sources, and/or misrepresented citations to real sources.

A lawyer in the United States was caught using ChatGPT to write a legal filing, which referenced legal cases that did not exist, and when the lawyer asked the chatbot for its source for the fictional legal cases, it lied that they were found on real legal databases.

ChatGPT has already accused multiple innocent people of being criminals, including a law professor it accused of groping students on a trip to Alaska, citing a 2018 Washington Post article. In reality the professor has never been accused of sexual misconduct, he's never even been to Alaska, and the Washington Post article does not exist.

The fact that AI chatbots are capable of ruining people's lives with false accusations, outright lying, and making up false sources is just the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.

These AI lies are fairly easy to spot now because the fake sources they cite are so obvious, but when challenged the chatbots have attempted to create the fake sources for themselves, to back up their own lies.

You only have to imagine the potential for chaos when these chatbots get better at lying, and better at creating fake sources to justify their lies.

Imagine somebody gets AI to spread lies about an impending nuclear attack on Russia and China by the United States, backed up by fake news articles, fake maps with fake secret nuclear bases in Turkey or wherever, deepfake video of the US President discussing this nuclear attack strategy ... (or threats of nuclear attack on the US and its allies from China or Russia).

We all know that fake news spreads across social media like wildfire, and the when the truth is revealed it invariably travels at a snail's pace and gets only a tiny fraction of the engagement, so how dangerous could a hoax like this actually be?

AI obviously doesn't have to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war to pose a threat to humanity, this is just a hypothetical example.

Imagine the destructive consequences of ever more powerful AI misinformation tools in the hands of the climate change denial lobby; fascist dictators; genocidal maniacs; stock market speculators; corrupt politicians police, and/or secret services; bonkers conspiracy theorists; scam artists; terrorists; or downright trolls who just want to watch the world burn.

As AI lies become more and more convincing, it's going to become even more difficult for people to discern the difference between reality and fiction, to a point where nothing remains believable.

We already live in a world where the boundaries between truth and fiction have been alarmingly eroded away, with so little pushback and punishment against dishonesty that the biggest political liars of all have already risen to become heads of state of some of the most powerful countries on earth (I don't even need to name them do I?)

But AI has the potential to accelerate the process dramatically, so that stock markets and governments tumble based on AI fakery, and real events and scandals are increasingly ignored and dismissed as fake.

We don't have to get locked into a debate over the worst case scenario of human extinction to recognise the very real dangers.

So what could be done about it?

There's already strong resistance to AI regulation from within the industry, and even if regulation were to be introduced, there would be significant problems.

What would stop AI industries simply moving to the countries that have the least AI regulation?

And if regulation was introduced to prevent AI misinformation, where would the line be drawn?

Banning AI from telling lies is nowhere near as simple as it sounds, because every time someone asks AI to do a funny task like find out who Nathan Fielder's "out of frame" friends are in his viral tweet, they're asking AI to lie about reality.

How do you make a computer programme discern the moral difference between faking an image for laughs, or faking an image to cause a stock market crash or to incite political/ethnic tensions?

So, is AI capable of making humanity extinct?

Nobody really knows. Maybe AI experts are overstating the power of their industry for dramatic effect, or maybe things just keep on getting more and more insane and dangerous from here on, until human survival is genuinely at risk.

But what is beyond doubt is that AI in the wrong hands will clearly have the power to spread conspiracies and lies; crash stock markets; topple governments; cause false persecution; accelerate climate change; trigger wars and ethnic cleansing; and erase the boundary between truth and fiction, which are all legitimate grounds for serious concern.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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8 ways to over-ride Facebook's censorship algorithm

As regular readers will know, the Another Angry Voice Facebook page has been having its posts hidden from its audience for over two months, based on ludicrous and unappealable accusations that links to facts and evidence constitute "spam".

Even before Facebook imposed these ridiculous and unjustifiable sanctions, the Facebook algorithm has been making Another Angry Voice, and a whole host of other independent left-leaning media sites, far less visible to their followers since 2018.

As a result of these changes to the algorithm, the vast majority of the 377,000 people who follow Another Angry Voice on Facebook never see a single post from it, from one month to the next.

Here are eight tips for trying to over-ride Facebook's censorship algorithm.

1. Weed: One very simple trick to improve your Facebook feed is to weed the pages that you follow. Go to your follow list and unfollow anything you’re not interested in any more.

2. Prioritise: Go into the "follow settings" on the Another Angry Voice page, and set it as one of your "favourites", this means you'll be much more likely to see AAV content in the future.

3. Reboot: (no need to do this if you did step 2). Go to your list of followed pages, then for any you particularly like Unfollow the page and immediately Follow again. This makes it look like the page is a ‘new interest’, which will give it priority in the algorithm.

4. Interact: Regularly interact with the Facebook pages that you particularly like (like, comment, share). The more you do this, the more you'll be shown their content in your Facebook feed. Even if it's just hitting the "like" button and leaving a one word/emoji comment on each post you see from them, this prioritises the page in your feed (I absolutely guarantee that no page owner is going to be annoyed at likes and/or one word/emoji replies).

5. Bookmark: Save the Another Angry Voice Facebook page as a bookmark in your usual web browser, and check in on it every now and then to see what the Facebook algorithm hasn't been showing you.

6. Backup: Follow the dormant AAV backup page Yet Another Angry Voice, which exists in case something happens to the main page.

7. Upgrade: Install the Facebook Purity add-on to your web browser. Then select the setting that over-rides the Facebook algorithm and allows you to see your news feed in chronological order. FB Purity is a truly excellent add-on, which dramatically upgrades the whole Facebook experience in multiple ways. There are a few other downloads that allow you to see your Facebook feed in chronological order too: Social Fixer is a browser add-on, and Friendly Browser is an app that works on mobile devices.

8.Diversify: Follow Another Angry Voice elsewhere (the blog and the Twitter account):

These tips also work for other Facebook pages that you particularly like. Add them as a 'favourite' in the page setting; interact regularly; bookmark them; follow their content on other platforms; and install an add-on to see your Facebook feed in chronological order.

I hope you find these tips useful.

If you have any other tips for over-riding the Facebook algorithm, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Tom (AAV)

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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How social media platforms reward misinformation-spreaders

Dan Hodges is the anti-left polemicist who wrote the Daily Mail's grotesque "Labour Should Kill Vampire Jezza" article, just ten days after Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered in the street in 2016.

Dan's absolutely notorious for his ability to find the wrong take on pretty much any subject, and many have even argued that he's actually delivering some kind of absurd wrong-on-purpose performance piece designed to create as much reaction as possible.

You may well ask why on earth anyone would want to make themselves look like a venal, mindless idiot on purpose, just for attention?

The reason of course is that social media sites are designed in such a way that the loudest, crudest, most attention-seeking idiots actually get rewarded by the algorithm, as a result of the reaction to the bile and misinformation they spew.

These grifters either get their content positively shared by users who have had their minds rotted away by years of exposure to the venal radical right culture war bollocks, or it gets amplified by masses of reasonable people trying to point out how wrong and/or completely unreasonable they're being.

The golden ticket for attention-seeking grifters is the kind of post that does massive numbers from both of these target audiences, like that dreadful GB News hack who was invited onto the BBC to argue in favour of drowning migrants, which caused the extreme-right demographic to gleefully retweet clips of it, and liberal icons with vast social media followings like Gary Lineker to spread it further and wider by retweeting it in order to say how much they disagreed with it.

This kind of polemical attention-seeking grift is the entire modus operandi of GB News, and it's absolutely no surprise that Dan Hodges has got himself involved with their professional grifting operation.
 

In some cases the traffic is entirely made up of condemnation, as with Dan Hodges' economically illiterate interpretation of a BBC News item about a tiny fall in the rate of inflation, which he tweeted with a caption reading "Cost of living falls, just as everyone predicted".

Over a thousand people responded with comments pointing out that Hodges was completely misrepresenting the meaning of the story, either through economic illiteracy, or out of a desire to deliberately spread misinformation.

It's absolutely obvious that a fall in the rate of inflation from 3.2% to 3.1% is not wonderfully good news for the British people, or for the government, when the inflation target is 2%, and the Bank of England rate of interest is a paltry 0.1%, but who cares about facts and evidence, when Dan can just claim the article he's sharing means the opposite of what it actually says?

A fall in the rate of inflation, is simply not the same thing as inflation falling (deflation), and it's no wonder that public understanding of economic issues is so poor, when high profile commentators like Dan Hodges spread economic misinformation like this with impunity.

After such a large backlash, anyone with a shred of decency would delete the post and put up an apology, but attention-seekers who value their social media numbers above their reputation would never erase such a post, because 1,400+ negative replies, and 400+ negative quote tweets all still point to the Twitter account of Dan Hodges.

For being totally wrong about something, Twitter rewards him with thousands of links pointing to his profile, and the algorithm even begins automatically offering his account as a 'suggested follow' to people who got involved in the conversation about how wrong he was!

Why on earth would Dan Hodges delete his reward for spreading misinformation?

And it's clear that he knows it's misinformation too, because his follow up Tweet admitted that he got it wrong, then smugly implied that the people at fault are actually the ones who got "agitated" by his misinformation (which produced himself another reward of hundreds more negative replies and negative quote tweets).

Dan Hodges publicly admits that he knows that it was wrong, but he's leaving it up anyway, meaning there's no way it can now be interpreted as anything other than deliberate misinformation.

And he's actually gloating at all the people who have called him out, and revelling in all the attention and free publicity!

If social media sites like Twitter actually cared about confronting misinformation, they'd allow users the means to effectively report misinformation (crowdsourced peer review), reduce the visibility of misinformation-spreading accounts, and improve the visibility of accounts that routinely tell the truth and cite their sources.

Instead, social media algorithms reward misinformation-spreaders by treating all the criticism of their misinformation as if it's people merely sharing and replying to something that's "interesting"!

We're well into the second decade of the social media age, and none of the social media platforms have even attempted to try to effectively resolve this rewarding misinformation problem.

In fact Facebook has even developed a bizarre "violations" system designed to reduce the visibility of accounts that cite evidence and sources, whilst allowing outright liars to get off scot free!

This failure to address the rewarding misinformation problem means the rabble-rousers, hate-mongers, attention-seekers, and misinformation-peddlers are obviously going to continue gaming poorly-designed algorithms to bag themselves ever more social media prominence.

In a system in which the more wrong, more venal, and more provocative the content, the higher the reward, it's natural that amoral attention-seeking grifters like Dan Hodges would continue to work the system to their advantage, isn't it?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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The gammons are incredibly easy to please aren't they?

Tory tax-dodger Michael Ashcroft has gone viral on Twitter posting a quite frankly deranged diatribe combining World War Two nostalgia and hard-right tabloid talking points.

The gammons absolutely lapped it up because WWII fetishism, spewing hate at minorities, and blasting anyone who dares criticise their beloved Tory lords and masters combines three of their absolute favourite things.

In this article I'm going to run through the whole thing, highlighting what a load of historically illiterate and quite frankly bigoted cobblers it is.

Firstly it's always important to establish what the source is. In this case it's the Tory tax-dodger Michael Ashcroft who is safely hiding away from the coronavirus crisis in the tax haven of Belize.

This is a guy who conned his way into the unelected House of Lords with commitments that he would end his non-dom tax status and begin actually paying his fair share of taxes in the UK, which he clearly never did.

Just look at his smug Tory face and ask yourself why the gammons love a Britain-hating tax-dodger like this so much.

Perhaps it's because somewhere deep beneath their faux patriotism, they also hate Britain too?

 

And why is it that the people who fetishise WWII the most egregiously always seem to be the baby boomers who weren't even alive when it happened?

The "Your Country Needs You" slogan was the most famous poster campaign from the First World War, so top marks to Ashcroft for getting his wars jumbled up whilst pretending to be a lover of British history and a patriot.

Probably the most famous Second World War slogan was "Careless talk Costs Lives", which was nice and clear. But imagine if the government had decided to replace this clear and intelligible statement with garbled gibberish like "Stay Alert By Washing Your Hands", which sounds more like the kind of thing a stroke victim would say before collapsing, than a government information campaign.

There would definitely have been complaints.

The thing with this coronavirus/Blitz analogy is that it completely falls to bits when you look at the contrasting government responses.

Back in 1940 the government threw everything it had at defending Britain from the Blitz during the Battle of Britain.

At the beginning of the coronavirus crisis Boris Johnson deluded himself into believing the world would celebrate him as the "Superman of Capitalism" for deliberately allowing the virus to spread, and then he told a confused looking Phillip Scholfield about how he was being advised to let the virus "move through the population".

It's easy to imagine that the British people would have asked questions like "why aren't you doing enough to prevent these air raids?" if the government policy of the day had been to allow the Nazi bombers to move freely through our skies!

In reality the air raid sirens didn't actually apply to everyone.

It was the job of people like Air Raid Wardens, anti-aircraft gunners, police, the fire service, the ambulance service ... to stay above ground and deal with the consequences, while the general public were expected to make their way to air raid shelters.

A similar situation exists now, with NHS and care home workers, the emergency services, retail staff, delivery drivers, bus drivers, utilities engineers and many others expected to work through the crisis.

You'd have to be dangerously mindless and politically illiterate not to have questioned who is affected by the lockdown measures and who isn't, or come to your own conclusions about who the essential workers in our economy really are.

A transparent dig at transgender people to rile up the gammon.

Why is it that the hysterical anti-trans droolers are so utterly obsessed with toilet facilities, to the extent of demanding that trans-women expose themselves to danger by using the male facilities?

And a comparison with the social norms of the 1930s and '40s shows us that all LGBTQ+ people were subjected to horrific systematic discrimination, imprisoned, sent to mental institutions, and even tortured with barbarism like chemical castration.

Are we really going to accept this maudlin nostalgia for the good old days when queer folk were routinely persecuted by the state?

And now a dig at vegans.

This WWII/Coronavirus analogy has just descended into simple-minded minority bashing hasn't it?

But if we try to actually consider the analogy, the reality is that even eight decades ago, and fighting a desperate war for survival, the British government managed to provide the public with portable gas masks.

The current Tory government failed so badly at providing sufficient ventilators that they ended up sending Covid-19 infected patients back to die in care homes so that their deaths wouldn't be recorded in the daily death stats.

Another dig at vegans!

First: Vegan milk is a good thing. If you haven't tried almond milk before, give it a go. I'm not vegan, but I actually prefer it to ordinary milk these days.

Second: If the UK government could have got away with replacing the milk in some people's rations with manufactured ersatz milk, they would have been absolutely delighted. If some 10% of the population wanted milk alternatives instead of milk, that would have meant less demand on farmers, and more dairy produce to share between the rest. A win-win for everyone, and a boost for the war effort too.

But let's all hate vegans eh? 

 Bloody hell!

He's finished with the LGBTQ+ community and the vegans, so now he's going after 'the blacks'!

He's clearly having a dig at skin tone plasters here, as if they're some kind of assault on decency and common sense.

A white person's reaction to skin-tone plasters tells you all you need to know about their attitudes.

Some will say "oh, that's cool", and easily grasp the fact that it's a good thing that non-white parents will now have the option of using plasters that don't imply that their kids' skin is the wrong colour, and wonder why this simple innovation didn't happen a lot sooner.

Others will adopt a culture war attitude and treat the concept of choice in plaster colours as if it's some kind of barbaric assault on Western Christian culture, even though they'll endlessly point to extravagant (to the point of being confusing) levels of choice elsewhere in the economy as evidence that their beloved capitalism is a good thing!

The fact is that the UK government spent the pre-war years rapidly building up stockpiles of weapons and ammunition because they saw the threat of Nazi expansionism coming.

In contrast the Tory government were repeatedly warned that stockpiles of medical equipment and protective gear were shockingly inadequate in the case of a viral respiratory disease, but they ignored the warnings, because ensuring adequate supplies for an emergency contrasted with their crackpot "let's cut our way to prosperity" austerity agenda.

Yet another astoundingly weak analogy that actually ends up making his beloved Tories look worse, if you know anything about the subject at all, which he apparently doesn't.

The gammons absolutely love this kind of ignorant, history-rewriting, minority-bashing, pro-government drivel don't they?

Conclusion

Digging beneath the inaccuracies, the brazenly inaccurate historical revisionism, and the multiple examples of minority-bashing, the core messages here are don't dare to be different, and don't criticise your government, no matter how badly they screw up.

But this also falls down spectacularly when we remember that widespread public dissatisfaction led to the departure of Britain's first war leader Neville Chamberlain, and his replacement with Winston Churchill.

If Britain was the kind of intolerant, fanatically right-wing, history-rewriting, dissent-crushing, minority-persecuting, leader-worshipping, autocracy that Ashcroft and the gammons so desperately want it to be today, Churchill would never have become Prime Minister, we would probably have lost the Second World War (or negotiated peace with the Nazis), and we'd have been just about as bad as the Nazis were anyway.

Aside from the fact it's almost always baby boomers doing the most egregious WWII fetishism, it also often tends to be people who have far more in common with the ideology of the Nazis than with the Allies doesn't it?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Who are the people behind all these annoying fake-grassroots Tory spam ads?

During the 2017 General Election campaign several small independent left-wing sites (Evolve Politics, The Canary, Another Angry Voice ...) went absolutely mega-viral on Facebook, generating hundreds of thousands of interactions, and millions of views, without paying out a single penny on sponsored Facebook adverts.

Incredibly I produced the number one, number two, and number seven most viral articles of the entire general election campaign, without paying Facebook anything. The articles went mega-viral purely because so many people liked, shared, and commented on them.

Facebook will not allow this to happen again.

Last year they dramatically clamped down on small independent media sites, using their algorithms to prevent any repeat of this kind of mega-viral independent media phenomenon.

So instead of seeing organic viral content in your Facebook feed this election, you're increasingly likely to see sponsored anti-Labour attack adverts from fake-grassroot organisations that have spent thousands of pounds to inject their propaganda ads into the Facebook feeds of their target audiences.

In this article I'm going to look at four of the worst offenders so far, and reveal the people behind them.

Working4UK

This fake-grassroots attack page was created on October 29th 2019.

The person behind it is Tory Party councillor Suraj Sharma who initially tried to pass it off as a non-political page to bypass Facebook's rules on political advertising. He was soon caught and made to register with the Facebook Ad Library, where you can see the propaganda he's been sending out, how much he's been spending, and who he's targeting with this Tory propaganda dressed up as grassroots activism.

Clearly none of this spending is being registered as Conservative Party election spending, and it's entirely unclear whether Sharma is using his own money to bankroll this propaganda campaign, or laundering it from elsewhere.

Right to Rent, Right to Buy, Right to Own

This page is masquerading as some kind of property rights advocacy group, but if you check out the sponsored ads they're pumping into people's Facebook feeds, it's clearly just a succession of hyperbolic anti-Labour, anti-Corbyn propaganda ads.

The page was created on September 30th 2019, less than a month before the general election was called, and has already managed to pick up 2,000 followers (presumably a bunch of selfish buy-to-let slumlords).

Clicking through to the "RtR,RtB,RtO" website provides absolutely no detail on who is behind this propaganda operation, with their "About Us" section telling you absolutely nothing about who they are, other than the fact they hate Jeremy Corbyn, a lot.

The Facebook Ad Library entry for this propaganda outfit names someone called "Jennifer Powers" from Surrey as the person who paid for all of these anti-Corbyn ads, and guess what ... she turns out to be another Tory party activist.

Parents' choice

This page promotes the private school sector, and defends the ability of elitist private schools to hide behind charitable status in order to avoid paying tax, despite many of them raking in tens of thousands per pupil, per year.

The page was set up on October 11th 2019, and has been pumping literally thousands of pounds worth of Tory propaganda into people's Facebook feeds.

The man behind this fake-grassroots operation is yet another Tory, this time the former Tory MP Richard Patrick Tracey.

Campaign Against Corbynism

This anti-Labour propaganda outfit is the most vitriolic of the lot, and guess what ... check out their Facebook Ad Library entry, and the guy paying for all of this vitriol is a Tory party activist and Conservative Home columnist called James Bickerton.

This page stands out from the others because it was created in March 2019, rather than immediately before the general election campaign, but it's pursuing the exact same strategy of blasting huge amounts of cash on pumping fake-grassroots Tory propaganda into people's Facebook feeds.

Where does all the money come from?

Back in 2017 left-wing pages like mine didn't need to pay Facebook to spread our content news feeds. We relied solely on the fact that we were providing an alternative narrative to the lamentable mainstream media narrative that Theresa May and the Tories were going to romp to victory, with the only possible debate being the eventual size of their thumping parliamentary majority.

This time around the Tories are attempting to buy the Facebook election with numerous fake-grassroots pages blasting through thousands of pounds each to inject their crudely disguised Tory propaganda into people's Facebook feeds.

It doesn't take a lot of investigative work to figure out who is behind these disingenuous propaganda operations, but it's impossible to trace where the money to pay for these propaganda ads is actually coming from.

Are we seriously expected to believe that these pages, most of which popped up out of nowhere at the exact same time, using the exact same tactics, similar graphic design styles, all operated by Tory party insiders, are not part of some deliberate coordinated Tory party effort to flood Facebook with a tsunami of fake-grassroots Tory propaganda?

Do they really expect people to be this gullible?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Surprise surprise, Tory FACTS are actually a bunch of lies!

The Tories are lying through their teeth about the NHS on social media.

Just look at the state of the Tweet they sent out accusing Labour of lying about their intentions towards the NHS.

Before we get to the meat of the criticism, there's the crude social media illiteracy of it to deal with.

Everyone knows that it's pathetic to beg for retweets once in a Tweet, let alone doing it twice. And anyone who hasn't learned by now that all-capitals use of "FACT" or "FACTS" is almost inevitably followed by a load of lies really shouldn't be allowed unsupervised access to the Internet should they?

Aside from the cringeworthy social media illiteracy, one of the first things to jump out is the turn of phrase "Prime Minister Boris Johnson has repeatedly made it clear that ...".

We've been assured by a notorious liar who has twice been sacked for lying, repeatedly lies to parliament and the public alike, and even lied to the Queen about his reasons for suspending parliament ... so we'd better take him at his word eh?

Then let's look at what the proven liar is assuring us about:

Apparently the Tories say they'll never agree to any free trade deal that puts the NHS on the table ...

But if this is true, why on earth did Boris Johnson whip his Tory MPs into voting down a Labour party motion to rule out a post-Brexit NHS privatisation frenzy?

If there are "no circumstances" in which they'd allow it to happen, why on earth did they feel the need to shoot down legislation aimed at making it legally impossible for it to happen?

It seems as if, shock horror, the Tory party might not be being entirely honest here!

Then there's their reiteration of their spectacularly misleading new "Get Brexit Done" propaganda trope.

Anyone with the remotest understanding of the actual Brexit process must understand that finalising the Withdrawal Agreement is only actually the end of phase one of a multi-phase process, and furthermore that if the withdrawal deal is hastily botched by an incompetent Prime Minister, it will cause all kinds of problems, deadlocks, and delays further down the line.

But unfortunately we've now entered the age of idiocracy in which mainstream media journalists actually praise political parties for glib content-free sound bites like "Get Brexit Done" or "Bollocks to Brexit" whilst vitriolically damning anyone who dares to venture any political position that can't be expressed in three words or fewer!

We've entered a dangerously dumbed-down, attention deficit political era where a three word lie has infinitely more political currency than a few sentences of truth, and things only seem to be getting worse.

Hence political pundits these days expend infinitely more effort criticising the font a dishonest political trope is written in, than the zero effort they've expended on explaining that the actual words are lies!

Then finally we get to the infographic itself, which starts off accusing the Labour Party of telling lies, right above a massive £9.2 billion whopper of their own.

The duplicitous Tories state that "the NHS is not for sale" as they're actively carving it up for the benefit of their private profiteer mates at a historically unprecedented rate!

And this isn't just some wild accusation by a small independent blogger, it's evidenced by their own damned figures, which show an all-time record £9.2 billion of the NHS budget distributed to private profiteers in 2018, up 14% from the previous year!

The Tory party are now so used to being not held to account by the mainstream media that they feel emboldened to spread outright lies all over social media, safe in the knowledge that nobody in the old media will actually call them out on it.

And this is why independent media is so important.

Yes, 'Tories are telling lies' is as surprising as 'bear shits in woods', but somebody still needs to do the work of spelling out how dishonest they're being, and what the actual reality is, while most of the mainstream media occupy themselves with the much more important task of uncritically regurgitating whatever ridiculous lies they've been spoon-fed by anonymous 'government sources'.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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